FBI probe held up citizenship

Department of Homeland Security officials decided in recent months not to grant an application for US citizenship by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, after a routine background check revealed that he had been interviewed in 2011 by the FBI, federal officials said Saturday.

Tsarnaev died early Friday after a shootout with the police, and officials said that at the time of his death, his application for citizenship was still under review and was being investigated by federal law-enforcement officials.

It had been previously reported that Tsarnaev's application might have been held up because of a domestic-abuse episode. But the officials said that it was the record of the FBI interview that threw up red flags and halted, at least temporarily, Tsarnaev's citizenship application. Federal law-enforcement officials reported Friday that the FBI had interviewed Tsarnaev in January 2011 at the request of the Russian government, which suspected that he had ties to Chechen terrorists.

The officials pointed to the decision to hold up that application as evidence that his earlier encounter with the FBI had not fallen through the cracks in the vast criminal and national security databases that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI review as a standard requirement for citizenship. The application, which Tsarnaev presented on Sept. 5, also prompted "additional investigation" of him this year by federal law enforcement agencies, according to the officials. They declined to say how far that examination had progressed or what it covered.

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The handling of Tsarnaev's application could be crucial for the Obama administration in the Senate debate that began last week over a bipartisan bill, which the president supports, for a sweeping immigration overhaul. Some Republicans skeptical of the bill have said they would watch the Boston bombings investigation to see whether it reveals security lapses in the immigration system that should be closed before Congress proceeds to other parts of the bill, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

The record of the FBI interview was enough to cause Homeland Security to hold up Tsarnaev's application. He presented those papers several weeks after he returned from a six-month trip overseas, primarily to Russia, and only six days after his brother, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, had his own citizenship application approved. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in custody and is in serious condition in a hospital.

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Late last year Homeland Security officials contacted the FBI to learn more about its interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, federal law-enforcement officials said. The FBI reported its conclusion that he did not present a threat.

At that point, Homeland Security officials did not move to approve the application nor did they deny it, but they left it open for "additional review."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev's record also showed that he had been involved in an episode of domestic violence in 2009. His father, Anzor, said in an interview Friday in Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives, that Tamerlan had a spat with a girlfriend and he "hit her lightly."

Under immigration law, certain domestic-violence offenses can disqualify an immigrant from becoming a U.S. citizen, and perhaps expose him to deportation. But the Homeland Security review found that while Tsarnaev was arrested, he was not convicted in the incident. The law requires a serious criminal conviction in a domestic-violence case for officials to initiate a deportation, federal officials said.

Both Tsarnaev brothers came to the United States and remained here legally under an asylum petition in 2002 by their father, who claimed he feared for his life because of his activities in Chechnya. Both sons applied for citizenship after they had been living here as legal permanent residents for at least five years, as the law requires.